Currently making the rounds on Facebook is this parenting blog post about our responsibility to teach kids about "good music." What a load of hipster-douchebag crap. My retort: How on earth did your kids get exposed to this "shitty" music in the first place? So when my eight-year-old daughter decides her favourite singer is Katy Perry, what do I do? In my mind, my daughter must make her own decisions.

If having liked boy bands is wrong, I don't want to be right. Because let's face it: pop music is great. Pop music gets you through angst and through hormones and through all of those terrible factors that define "turbulent teens," but pop music by boy bands does a little bit more.

When my friend got over the Spice Girls, I was crushed. Not only did the Spice Girls represent something I wanted desperately to be a part of (a group of friends, to begin with), but our love of the band was something we shared. True, neither of us was popular, and our obsession with the Fab Five seemed completely insane, but we were in it together. And then all of a sudden it wasn't "cool."

"I really like the writing process, the conceptualization of new music," Mother Mother's Ryan Guldemond says. "Then recording it, it becomes so real and unveiled. And when you start touring, same thing; you're sort of punched in the face by reality."